The capacity to navigate through the world creates opportunities for children to explore, learn, and maintain fitness. Following debilitating accidents, injuries, surgeries, or illnesses, some children experience difficulty walking. Gait therapy, involving intensive and repetitive stepping, is often recommended to enhance the child's walking ability. Effective gait therapy is also critical to children who have difficulty walking due to developmental, neurologic or orthopedic conditions.
Some methods of pediatric gait retraining include manual overground gait training with assistance from a clinician, partial body-weight support treadmill training, and robotic therapy. The manual assistance that clinicians provide during overground gait therapy and partial body-weight support treadmill training can be very physically challenging for a clinician. Robotic devices tend to be very expensive, thus prohibiting widespread use. Current gait training technologies can be cost prohibitive and often do not address the needs of children of varying sizes. In addition, clinicians often need to provide significant physical assistance to children with profound weakness.